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After heart surgery, it’s normal to want to return to everyday activities. Your routine will occur with time, but first, your body needs proper rest to heal the sternum after the procedure. To ensure that you recover and advance at the appropriate rate, there are precautions to take for sternum stabilization.

1. Avoid Lifting Heavy Weights

It can be difficult to adjust to limited exercises, but it will help speed up recovery time. If you are used to performing arm exercises, do not lift anything heavier than ten pounds. For the first eight weeks of your recovery, you should only raise one-half or one pound weights to improve sternum stabilization. Ten bicep curls on each side is a gentle start. Make sure to have a pillow or some form of security harness to protect your sternum.

Considering how important they are, our ribs are often overlooked. We pay more attention to the bones that are always moving, always working, and we don't spare much more than a fleeting thought for our ribs. It hasn't always been this way. When we were young and learning about human bone structure, our eyes were often drawn to the ribs on the school diagram—after all, ribs are fascinating, strange, like protective fingers stretched over our vital organs, and our young minds found it strange that such an alien bone-structure existed inside of us. Now, though, we rarely see such diagrams, the fascination has faded, and the ribs are dismissed in daily life. The moment something goes wrong, however, like a fractured rib, our attention is immediately returned to these bones.

We've all heard it before: "life's a journey, not a destination." While that may be true in life, there are some things that are defined by the destination and not the journey. For example, what about a trip to the grocery store? Chances are, you're not too focused on the journey itself; it's a combination of roads you've driven a thousand times before, stoplights you know like the back of your hand, and turns you could make with your eyes closed (although that's not recommended). In this case, most of us are more concerned with the destination. What do we need at the store? Will it be crowded? How fast can we get the job done? It's true: there are many things in life where destination is emphasized over journey--and heart surgery is one of them.

When you don't feel well, what is it that you look for or do to make yourself feel better? For some of us, the key to comfort might be a movie and a warm drink. For others, listening to good music might be the key. Still others prefer to turn to comfort food to make themselves feel better--after all, there's a reason it's known as comfort food! Whatever it is that you turn to when trying to make yourself feel better, you can clearly see that your body and your mind, working together, know what to do in order to help you. It's like your body was programmed to know what it needs (even if it's just a chocolate bar) and when it needs it. The same is true after heart surgery--although your body might require a little help knowing just what it needs.